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“Sometimes I feel like Jane Goodall observing nature in the wild—and then I can just put on my engineering hat and go tinker around with their brains.”
– American ‘robot whisperer’ and
ATONATON founder Madeline Gannon, on the “handcrafted algorithms” that drive her menagerie of industrial machines. “My robots are distinctively obnoxious when you’re around them,” Gannon reveals to
Dezeen ’s Cajsa Carlson. “And I have to imagine that’s a piece of my personality embedded within that, you know; they’re in your face.”
OUT NOW :
Ralf Baecker
Cybernetic Imaginaries
Baecker ’s first monograph expands on his esoteric machinations exploring “the fundamentals of the digital, cybernetics, artificial neural networks, and artificial life” with detailed documentation and texts by
Siegfried Zielinski ,
Andreas Broeckmann , and
Daria Parkhomenko .
“Be less scared of large language models, be more scared of the people that own them saying things like ‘the new Turing Test should be can an AI make a million dollars.’”
Mischievous game modders 2girls1comp release Every Thing (2023), an experimental Grand Theft Auto V mod that “sequentially spawns every object from the game’s prop database until the program ultimately crashes.” A video showing it in action (image) reveals a small-to-large amassing of furnishings, signs, trees, and infrastructure into a dense illegible volume of CGI pseudo-matter. “It’s a reverse Katamari Damacy . The antithesis of Jenga,” quips machinima and videogame art scholar Matteo Bittanti.
Billed as their largest solo show to date, Eva & Franco Mattes ’ “Fake Views” opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (DE), illuminating platform culture, internet infrastructures, and online communities. For their new installation P2P (2022-23, image), for example, the Italian net art duo invited peers Nora Al-Badri , Simon Denny , Do Not Research , Olia Lialina , Jill Magid , and Jon Rafman to create new works to be hosted on a peer-to-peer server enclosed in a wire cage—an ‘exhibition within the exhibition.’
“We have to prepare for an economy where our digital twins earn more than we do.”
– British musician and technologist
Mat Dryhurst , on the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ (
AMPTP ) ‘groundbreaking’
AI proposal . Sold as protecting the digital likeness of American actors, Screen Actors Guild (
SAG ) members argue the move would exploit digital scans of actors for eternity. “AI spawning tech is so powerful precisely because our data can be used as surrogates for us,” writes Dryhurst. “To a bot, our data
is us. As such, strong AI policy would determine our likeness (data) as inalienable.”
Diving full-on into data aesthetics, Dutch artist (and half of JODI ) Joan Heemskerk ’s “REc+ >>>” opens at Brussels’ Rectangle (BE). Broadly engaging networks, data, and cryptography, Heemskerk foregrounds the abstraction implicit in computation, in one piece visualizing a mournful requiem for a (crypto) wallet and in another taking the elegant mathematics of base number system conversion (2 to 8 to 16) and expressing it as a sculptural colour study (image: Untitled , 2023).
What Just Happened? :
Burak Arikan Maps Power Structures, Financial Flows, and Networks of Influence
The New York-based artist discusses the collector ecosystem revealed by his ‘meta NFT’ Social Contracts (2023) and the evolution of peer-to-peer economies
“The future isn’t what it used to be,” a 3-year investigation on the impact of text-to-image generative AI on creativity, kicks off at Centre Pompidou. Co-organized by KADIST, speakers including Ho Rui An , Éric Baudelaire , and Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst gather to address “cultural aggregation, artistic consent, and copyright” at the Paris event. Highlights include a screening of Nouf Aljowaysir ’s Ana Min Wein (Where am I From?) (2022, image), and a lecture-performance by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian .
“Moving as half-human half-machine, we enter the stage like Terminator robots hyping the crowd with claims of world domination,” Mary Maggic recalls opening “Climate Fitness ” at Intermediae Matadero Madrid. Faster Higher Stronger (2022), a cross-species performance and installation, had Maggic and collaborators ride bicycle-powered bioreactors. “In the background, SCOBY flesh spins with us, synchronized to the tune of optimized aesthetics,” she writes. “The crowd films through their phones, peering like voyeurs into a mirror of their own reality.”
“Art doesn’t play fetch with approval. It chews the slippers of convention and relishes in the surprise of its own bark.”
–
Mario Klingemann ’s ChatGPT-powered robot dog,
A.I.C.C.A. (Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine, 2023), putting the pun in pundit. Unveiled in June at Espacio Solo in Madrid, the “performative sculpture” comments on the “endless barrage of AI-created art to consume, critique, or rather, endure,” says Klingemann. It also pokes fun at the art world, “which—let’s admit it—can occasionally obsess over the art of spouting profound, if at times inscrutable, BS.”
German media scholar Roland Meyer reveals AI image synthesis tools to be “redundancy processing machines,” as he pushes Midjourney’s new zoom-out feature to the extreme. Prompting a “family enjoying a barbecue” that yields a painterly “all-white, middle-class, suburban American dream world,” the AI keeps adding more of the same—more white people, more barbecue grills—as Meyer zooms out. “Redundancies collapse in on themselves,” muses Meyer, until, eventually, “clichés turn into nightmares.”
“European scientists seem to be quite captivated that this time period starts very recently. For Indigenous and other displaced and dispossessed peoples who were impacted by violence over the last 600 years, everything that leads up to what makes this global shift possible starts much earlier.”
– Métis Anthropologist
Zoe Todd , problematizing
debates about how recently the Anthropocene began [quote edited]
“What’s the default language that you go to to do that? It’s the modernist grid. That’s how you understand making new lands. That’s how you understand these digital frontiers. ”
– New Zealand artist
Simon Denny , discussing why landscape painting is an apt medium for representing Web3 land plots (e.g.
Decentraland ) in
Metaverse Landscapes (2023). “The Dutch have this long tradition—many colonial landscapes were painted in South Africa and Indonesia,” he adds, further complicating the marketing of virtual space. [quote edited]
Aram Bartholl ’s solo exhibition “Package ready for pickup” opens at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE), kicking off the church-turned-gallery’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Highlighting material flows and environmental degradation, Berlin-based Bartholl presents e-waste recycling crates, QR code climate alerts, and chandeliers made from salvaged TVs. The highlight: a pop-up DHL package station will service customers for the duration of the exhibition, drawing non-art audiences to the show and its themes.
“The large-scale AI installation that makes live images on the fly is: a) a major technological breakthrough, b) a screensaver for rich people, c) 404 not found.”
– Art consultants
Chen & Lampert , being
quite sardonic in “Hard Choices: Do You Actually Like Video Art?” Half-joke (and half-truth) the cheeky survey probes participants about Nam June Paik and politically charged multi-channel installations to help them “test their tolerance for moving-image art.”
“Working With Waste,” a show presenting the outputs of an eponymous working group led by British artist Lucy Beech , opens at Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg (DE). Presented is Beech’s recent video art exploring waste and transformation (image: Warm Decembers , 2022) alongside contributions from Riar Rizaldi , James Richards , and Steve Reinke . The works consider notions of flow and blockage relative to “not only individual guts and urban drainage networks, but also to understandings of creativity.”
Curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi , “shadow work,” the flagship exhibition of the 11th edition of Vector Festival , opens in Toronto. Artists including Imogen Clendinning , Allan Pichardo , and Swarm contribute works probing tensions between rigid classification and lived experience. In Portals, Not Homes (2023, image), for example, Zoe Osborne and the Tamil Archive Project (Krish Dineshkumar, Nithursan Elamuhilan, Vasuki Shanmuganathan ) turn childhood memories of shopping for imported goods into an immersive experience.
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